Poetry of James Paul Gee

A Red Rock Coffee Shop

Surrounded by red wilderness
In a New Age coffee enclave
Where crystals replace gods
Who fail us or who we fail.

Tourists come in
Miffed by the scruffy men who read palms
And the healing women
Who teach us how to talk to cats so they won’t eat meat anymore.

Mark is one of us.
He survived a cancer
He helped along by treating himself with herbal medicines and New Age wisdom
Before a brutal course of chemotherapy cured him.

Mark is all of us.
To survive means to treat a sickness of the soul we help along
With unrequited desires and Old Age nostrums about success
Before the brutal truth of old age cures us.

Now that Mark is cured, he works in the coffee shop
Happy with a new New Age insight
That his miracle cure saved him for something important
Something still to come, something to wait for.

Now that I am cured, I sit in the coffee shop
Happy with an old Old Age insight that all is vanity.
Ecclesiastes says too that there is no new thing under the sun.
But nonetheless I still wait to see what will come.